There
is no need for logic in farce, but it certainly helps. Take a scene in Alexander
and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day (The comma is your friend) in
which the eldest son of the family takes his driving test. It has already been
established that the family's day has been and will continue to be a terrible,
horrible, no good, and very bad one, so it's no surprise that the test goes
terribly, horribly, no good, etc. wrong. The tester tricks the boy to answer his
cellphone while driving and yells at him, causing the boy to violently swerve
into oncoming traffic, take out several parking meters, and otherwise damage the
family van and put himself and others in unnecessary peril.

This is
a bit of an overreaction, wouldn't you say?Farce, in a way, depends on overreaction, but good farce knows to keep it
grounded in some kind of reality or, at least, in tune with whatever basic
characterizations have been afforded to the players. Nothing in the movie
suggests that the kid is the type to completely lose control of himself in the
way the scene requires, and our experience with such a situation certainly makes
us doubt that the boy's response has a foundation in reality.

We're
not considering these things in the moment, of course. The primary concern is
that the scene simply isn't funny. That's when the question of why it isn't
comes into play. To put it a little more simply than the aforementioned reasons,
it's because the scene, like the overwhelming majority of the movie's comic
setpieces, tries too hard. This is a movie that forces its characters into kooky
scenarios with little interest if those scenarios make any sense for the
characters or in any form of real-world experience.

It
starts because Alexander (Ed Oxenbould), the middle son in the family, has had a
history with terrible, horrible, etc. days, and no one in his family seems to
care. His father Ben (Steve Carrell) has been out of work for months; he's
trying to juggle taking care of the family's newborn baby and looking for a job.
He has a job interview lined up on Alexander's birthday. Alexander's mother
Kelly (Jennifer Garner) works in public relations for a publishing company.
She's trying to find a balance between her professional and personal lives, and
there's a big event on Alexander's birthday that could seal a promotion.

Anthony
(Dylan Minnette), the eldest son, is trying to please a perfectionist girlfriend
(Bella Thorne), and Alexander's birthday is also the day Anthony might finally
get his driver's license and drive his girlfriend to prom. Emily (Kerris
Dorsey), the sole female sibling, is preparing for the role of Peter Pan in the
school play, which, as you might have guessed, is also on Alexander's birthday.
Just after midnight on his birthday, Alexander makes himself a sundae, blows out
a candle, and wishes that his family would experience the kind of terrible, etc.
day to which he has become accustomed.

Thus
begins the day. Ben's second job interview at a restaurant turns sour when the
sleeves of his shirt are set ablaze, although, considering that the interview
has consisted of everyone getting drunk and Ben having shrimp flung into his
mouth, the accident doesn't quite seem like the potential deal-breaker the movie
makes it out to be. Kelly's celebrity reading of a book about potty training
goes badly when it turns out the printers changed the word "jump" to
"dump," which doesn't even sound like something that could happen
(Dick Van Dyke is the celebrity, and he has a self-deprecating line that calls
the relevancy of his cameo into question). Anthony's girlfriend dumps him, and
Emily gets a cold on the day of her big performance, resulting in her getting
high on cough syrup and single-handedly ruining the production (Ben's
after-the-fact warning about medicinal abuse feels false, given that we're
supposed to laugh at her antics).

Rob
Lieber's screenplay (based on Judith Viorst's book) offers too much to too
little comic effect, and the previously described events are just the most
prominent situations in a cascading series of misfortunes. There's plenty more,
but none of them is particularly funny. The movie's few laughs come from the
lower-key moments, such as Ben's first interview, which doesn't try anything
more than observing the awkwardness of having a serious job interview while a
baby is banging into a glass wall in the participants' peripheral vision.
Carrell and Garner smartly focus on a gradually increasing sense of frustration
with events, and both provide some genuinely amusing jokes during what seem to
be improvised riffs.

In
between the chaos of its madcap situations, director Miguel Arteta finds some
time (during the course of the movie's graciously and admirably succinct 80
minutes) to give us the sweeter, more endearing side of this family. They come
together to support each other as everything goes wrong, and that keeps Alexander
and the Terrible Horrible No Good Very Bad Day grounded in at least some
form of emotional reality. It may not be much, but it is something.